Recovering from any disruption requires the right people. When it comes to disaster recovery plan, success will depend on quickly mobilizing a team to maintain business uptime.

Every user in your company can be affected by an incident that is escalated to a disaster. By identifying people you will need to quickly restore operations as part of your planning, ideally your customers won’t be affected because you’ll be able top to bounce back quickly and minimize the disruption to business operations.

Keep disaster recovery reflexes sharp

Your disaster recovery plan should include a management team that takes on the critical responsibilities and decision making, starting with whether the disruption is in fact a disaster.

If it’s concluded that the incident is severe enough to meet the criteria, your disaster recovery team must mobilize and do the following:

Manage and coordinate the disaster recovery plan

Activate other staff in the organization, as well as your service provider, in priority—some people may be needed immediately, while others need to be on standby depending the role in the plan

Ramp up any alternate facilities and secondary sites

Review the recovery procedures to be activated that will support your recovery objectives

Who should be on the team?

There are several key roles that should be already be assigned by your disaster response management plan before a disruption occurs.

The success of any disaster recovery plan depends on how quickly a team can be mobilized to maintain business uptime

Your information security group should always be represented on your disaster recovery team, as they have specific, specialized responsibilities, including a review of the recovery goals, understanding the magnitude of the damage, and making sure information security procedures are followed by the disaster recovery team. They can also assist with the preparation of an accurate news media statement that outlines a description of the incident, how and when it happened, and who will be affected and how.

Other team members include a disaster recovery coordinator to liaise with your service provider and any vendors that might contribute to the affected infrastructure. Their job should also be to set up a schedule for status updates throughout the recovery process right up until full restoration.

Another important role you must fill is that of a disaster recovery crisis manager, whose job it is to keep everyone informed on latest developments and be a single point of contact for all team members. They have several critical responsibilities, including:

Making sure all users and are familiar with the disaster recovery management plan.

Provisioning additional telephone lines for extra staff if needed.

Getting a snapshot of activities in progress when the disruption happened from the information security team, an estimate as to how long these activities will be delayed, and when the next update can be expected.

Developing a public statement approved by disaster response management team that can be distributed to everyone affected, including customers and users, as well as media. Multiple statements may be required, including one when the recovery operation is done, and regular business activities have resumed.

Having a well-thought disaster response management plan in place will only be effective if the right people there are to executive as soon as the alert is sounded. You should frequently revisit your plan to confirm the people assigned to these critical roles understand their responsibilities and that they are still available should disaster strike.

If you haven’t begun to think about disaster recovery planning or feel your plan needs an update, check out our Disaster Recovery Primer.

Every organization today is data driven, regardless of size, and it’s just a matter of when, not if, that data is put in jeopardy. For small and medium-sized business with resource and IT infrastructure constraints, it can seem an overwhelming challenge to prepare an effective disaster recovery plan and maximize business uptime.

The good news is that cloud computing allows smaller organizations to enjoy the same peace of mind large enterprises have with the help of an experienced technology partner who help you lay out at plan of action when disaster strikes.

What you should expect from a solid disaster recovery plan

The point of any disaster recovery plan is to make sure there are steps in place to restore any mission critical applications and data after a disruption. It outlines all the all the activities, resources and procedures in the event of a disaster so you can ensure business uptime and return to normal operations as quickly as possible in the event of a disruption.

It starts by notifying everyone who needs to be part of the solution that there is a problem, whether it’s company staff or resources at your service provider, and outlines who’s responsible for what. Once the process is underway, the recovery phase should enable you to restore temporary operations and repair any primary system damage. There’s a lot that needs to happen during the recovery, and an effective disaster recovery plan will coordinate and facilitate communication between all parties involved.

Mapping the connections

There’s also a lot of moving pieces that must be considered. A disaster recovery plan should identify the processes that are in scope, who is responsible for those processes and all the interdependencies affected by the disaster.

Dependencies will help establish the severity of the disaster—one single glitch may be just that or could have a much broader impact on business operations. When a single resource becomes unavailable, it affects many user and customers, and disrupts multiple business processes. Here are some examples of dependencies your disaster recovery should keep in mind:

Reporting and analytics: Collection, logging, filtering, and delivery business data to relevant stakeholders may stop working and the user interface layer may or may not be also affected.

Interfaces: Users at all levels, including administrators, may be blocked from accessing software and systems, whether it’s on the client or server side, through web interface or downloaded application.

Networking: Connectivity to necessary resources could be slow or disappear completely. compromised and/or significant latency issues in the network exist that result in lowered performance.

Storage: Even if your connectivity and applications are functioning, the failure of a storage resource such as storage area network (SAN) could block access to a handful of files essential for running the business.

There are many more dependencies, and your service provider is well-equipped to help you identify them so you can quickly resolve issues and take advantage of secondary infrastructure in case of an interruption that has a broad impact on your business.

If you haven’t begun to think about disaster recovery planning or feel your plan needs an update, check out our Disaster Recovery Primer.